


Home in My Arms

by minnabird



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Mild Gore, Songfic, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-09
Updated: 2012-07-09
Packaged: 2017-11-09 12:09:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/455289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minnabird/pseuds/minnabird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After John dies in a car accident, Sherlock invents a time machine and tries to save John only to find things aren't that easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home in My Arms

**Author's Note:**

> This is unashamedly The Broken Bride by Ludo in fic form with Sherlock as the Traveler and John as the Bride. I really do suggest you listen to that album because it's freaking amazing and gave me enough feels I just had to spill them here!

Sherlock was digging through a skip when his world shattered. He wouldn’t know until hours later, after a brisk chase through the streets of Southwark. Lestrade was late coming to get the murderer he’d called Sherlock to find in the first place, which annoyed Sherlock. When he did come he looked grave and sad, which Sherlock would have dismissed if Lestrade’s first act hadn’t been to hug him.   
  
John was on his way to the surgery when it happened. It wasn’t the cabbie’s fault. Witnesses said the car came out of nowhere. The driver was dead, the car totaled, so Sherlock couldn’t even satisfy himself a little with hunting John’s killer down.   
  
In the end, it was a depressingly mundane death; the only oddity was that John had appeared to share his cab with someone. The dental records had turned up no record, but that could mean plenty of things, and there was really no way to turn it into a murder-suicide engineered by someone whose identity was secret.   
  
But nothing about Sherlock was mundane, especially not his mourning.   
  
He was determined to get his John back, by any means possible. He wasn’t about to believe in ridiculous things like bringing the dead back to life (though he considered researching it, in a dark moment). But he was willing to throw logic out the window a little and put his faith in time travel. It took the most brilliant man in London only ten years to work out what most people thought an impossibility. But the ten years spent building his time machine felt like eons to Sherlock, without John.   
  
It was imperfect, his creation. There was no way to test it; he simply had to use it and trust his work. It spun wildly out of control. One minute he was in London, the next he was fending off flying creatures - reptile-birds. He had no word for them, having long ago deleted even the cursory knowledge of dinosaurs he’d had as a child.   
  
For one moment filled with dark shapes hurtling past his head and the sharp sting of claws, he thought he would die here, ten years of work wasted, never having seen John again.   
  
He found shelter in a cave, but his precious machine was still outside. He watched the reptile-birds, charting their courses, observing their behavior, nursing his bruises and cuts - biding his time till he could make a run for the machine.   
  
It was a wild run of it too; he almost felt alive for a moment. He set his machine into motion at the last possible second.  I’m coming, John,  he thought, stomach swooping with hope.    
  
But his machine hadn’t changed any, and he careened through time again, fetching up at last on some foreign shore, fuel cells all but drained. He was stranded, unless he could somehow find fuel in this new era.   
  
This time was even more horrible: like a nightmare, except Sherlock didn’t have nightmares like this. The city was dark, though the hazy suggestion of light high in the murky sky indicated daytime. It was in ruins, nearly, the shabby remains of a once-splendid city hall across the blood-stained square from him. People huddled on its vast marble steps around and in makeshift tents and shanties. Somewhere, off in the distance, a fire was burning unchecked.   
  
The world was dying, they told him. Sherlock ignored the nonsense about gods and devils and focused on the other details. The seas were sludge, the animals dying out, the air completely clogged. But worse than that, far more horrifying, was the army of dead-but-not soldiers preying on the living. Sherlock wouldn’t have believed them, except that the first time they attacked after his arrival he saw a man gurgle out his last breath and then get up, vacant eyes staring. He had felt hollow with horror then, the man who viewed gore and danger with equal calm.   
  
And then the dragon came.   
  
It was like the reptile-birds, but a hundred, no, a thousand times their size: so massive it seemed to blot out the grey sky. The city erupted in chaos, an orgy of fear. Even the dead-men-walking seemed to shrink away from the thing.   
  
Sherlock’s mind whirled, and suddenly, in the midst of Hell, he had a shining breakthrough. “Of course!” he cried, to ears deafened by the roar of the dragon. “Of course, that’s how to control it!” The crowd seethed around him, taking no notice. There was a sharp pain in his heart: no small dear man now to give him that luminous smile and tell him he was amazing.  I’ll find you , he promised again, but he knew already it was destined to be broken. John’s light had been the only thing keeping him going, and he was about to sacrifice his only chance at catching even just one more glimpse of it. Either way, he wasn’t going to make it back to see John again; at least this way he could earn John’s high opinion of him at long last.   
  
He was going to be a hero for John.   
  
In another moment, he was pushing his way back to the square, setting to work, tweaking the machine’s controls. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment -  goodbye, John -  and threw the switch that would bring it roaring to life.   
  
A hole opened up in the fabric of the world, rippling and crackling around the edges, visible only in a tricky, corner-of-your eyes way. Everyone could see the dragon being sucked away, though, swirling slowly into the hole like carded wool being spun into thread. They ran away from the epicenter, and when the dragon was gone, the only person left standing in the square was Sherlock.   
  
The hole closed up from top to bottom, as if it was being zipped shut, and as the last gap disappeared a spurt of sparks rose from Sherlock’s machine with a bang. With it, Sherlock’s knees gave out, and he crashed to the ground. For the first time since John had died, he cried. He knelt staring as the tears fell down his face, hand clenched over his mouth.   
  
They gave him privacy until he calmed, but then a contingency of the city-dwellers came forward.   
  
“You saved us all. Why do you weep?” their leader, a woman with strength just peeking out past her timidity, asked. “Rise, traveler, and tell us.”   
  
“I wanted to save him,” Sherlock said, chin tilted up. He had bared his heart already to them; he would tell his truth now. “ My  John. But it’s impossible now,” he added bitterly, waving his hand towards his broken machine.   
  
The woman glanced sideways at her compatriots, who were shifting. “We can send you back to him,” she said, in her deep, grave voice.   
  
He stared. “You can - but you let all this happen! Why not change it?” He narrowed his eyes. “There must be a catch.”   
  
“You cannot change the past,” the woman explained, and her kindliness made Sherlock want to rage all the more. “We tried, but we only made it happen all the more certainly.” She stepped forward, reaching across to brush her fingers against his arm. “I wouldn’t wish this world on you, but it is ours and we will offer you a place in it gladly, Traveler. But I think that you must go back to your own time, your own John. What you do when you are there is your choice.”   
  
Their machines were far more sophisticated than his, so finely tuned that they asked which minute of that day he wanted to be sent back to. He knew it by heart: the minute he had left John to go chasing through Southwark. He added a minute, to be sure he wouldn’t meet himself - he would have too many questions, tedious - and stepped onto the mat.    
  
The world turned to white, and when the glare cleared away he found himself standing in the doorway to their bedroom, eyes fixed on one of John’s socks, lying on the wood floor. He raised his eyes and caught his breath at the sight.  John, John, John,  was his every thought, and he was across the room in a minute, curling up behind John.  Oh, God, he’s real,  he thought as he wrapped his arm around John, awash in his warmth.    
  
“Back so soon?” John asked, his voice bleary with sleep, and Sherlock wanted to tell him that he’d been in this bedroom in his heart ever since the accident, that not one day had gone by without him returning in spirit. Instead he kissed the back of John’s neck, taking in every sensory detail available to him: the little wrinkles from bending his neck, the smell of his skin, the feel of it against his lips, smooth and warm and slightly dry, its taste as he ran his tongue along the vertebrae, the coarseness of John’s short hair when he pressed his nose into it, John’s soft sigh as he turned to Sherlock, and  oh, that smile -   
  
They were kissing then, tangled up in each other, slow and warm and loving as Sherlock memorized every moment.    
  
John pulled away at last, smiling ruefully. “I’ve got work, or else I’d be happy to do this all day.”    
  
Sherlock watched as John dressed, brow furrowed. “Stay here. Tell work we had a case.”   
  
John smiled at Sherlock and leaned down to kiss him as he buttoned his shirt. “Work misses me enough when there are real cases.”   
  
Sherlock rested a hand on the side of John’s neck, mind churning as he tried to think of a way to stop this - but he couldn’t. The woman had told him: no time traveler had ever changed the outcome of the events he or she traveled to. Perhaps - perhaps it was smarter to simply get as much of John as he could while he had this.    
  
His breath caught as his mind made a connection, produced a solution. “Let me ride with you,” he said, swallowing hard and trying to sound normal when he continued. “I had an e-mail, there’s a case that looks to be promising. I need to take a look at a few things near your surgery.”   
  
“All right,” John said, and they hailed a cab together. Sherlock insisted on wrapping an arm around John, his lips resting against his temple. John melted obligingly into him, and a glance showed his cheeks a little pink with pleasure. Sherlock was usually more discreet, preferring to keep the sight of him affectionate private, just for John.   
  
Sherlock saw the car coming, just, and had time only to pull John into a desperate kiss.   
  
When he opened his eyes, a shiver of horror went down his spine. Was he like the dead-men-walking in the end days? But no: this wasn’t the street, this wasn’t a smoking and bent cab. This was a chalky ridge, looking out over rolling green pastures. He turned and found John at his side, looking wonderingly round. John seemed to spot something, and Sherlock followed the line of his gaze to a little cottage surrounded by lilacs, beehives peeking round the back.   
  
“I think that’s home,” John said peacefully, and Sherlock grinned. He grabbed John and spun him round, laughing, pure joy bubbling out of him. He set John down at last and kissed him, still smiling.   
  
“Let’s go home,” he said, his hand on John’s cheek.


End file.
